A Sense of Destiny

By Ella O'Kelly

Pearce Monaghan, the dynamic charismatic minister in
Ireland's newest political party is enjoying popular support by the
electorate, who see him as a future leader. Yet his world starts to
unravel when he purchases land for a job program from the
seductive and beautiful Avis, an American horse trainer with a
castle in Kildare. His political rivals spread rumors of profiteering,
conflict of interest and murder.

Against this backdrop of Irish political life, Rosie Leahy,
a journalist, and Connell McDaid, an aide to the minister, join
forces to restore the image of Pearce and the political party. Their
love affair unfolds as they dig deep to uncover the mysteries
behind the crimes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781614683865

Book preview

EPILOGUE

ONE

It was a day of triumph for the Chief and a sort of hallelujah for the Party to flaunt its achievements and gloat over their successes.

It was Pearce Monahan’s idea to have the rally in Cavan, Ireland where Mary Joseph had won the by-election.

It was a highly emotional night, maybe the best ever. The skeptics, cynics and begrudgers seemed to have been skimmed away. It ended up being a free-for-all in the ballroom of the hotel, with speeches and exuberant music. The crowd was a mix of all ages, from both town and country. They flowed around the room, responding to the atmosphere, and jostled a little to get closer to the Taoiseach (Ireland’s Prime Minister) and Minister Monahan. These two stood side by side in front of a banner that stretched across the stage: The National Democratic Party. Ireland’s Force in the 21st Century.

The Taoiseach spoke briefly as he was not the best orator.

He left it to Pearce Monahan to put his special touch on the speeches with his particular style. Tall, with a quick smile, curly black hair sprinkled with grey, and a lot of charm, some mused he might be a reincarnation of those early Irish politicians who had inspired the populace. It had been a long time since there had been someone like this to take part in the leadership of the country. The audience listened with hope and enthusiasm.

Ten years ago they spoke of the National Democratic Party (NDP), new and struggling as we were then. ‘How far can this party go? It’s nothing but a passing fancy.’ How wrong they were.

He let them whoop and clap for that one. Looking around the room, he remained still for a moment more, savoring the adulation. The crowd went quiet again.

Now, a word to those who underestimated us…this party is a power to be reckoned with. Our policies will take our country forward. We can do it together.

Then he saw her regarding him from below. Without missing a beat in his delivery, he ranged over her exotic face and taunting half-smile.

The rest of the crowd faded out in the midst of the cheers.

Avis Johnson-Carter drove her black BMW up to the restaurant, La Serre, at a minute past one, finding a parking spot close to the door as a delivery van pulled out.

She popped down the visor and looked at her reflection in the mirror then ran a slender brush over her shiny black hair. The eyes that looked back at her with their slightly slanted tilt were alert and watchful as she scanned the parking area.

Being alert was second nature to her.

Pearce Monahan came bounding out from beneath the awning to meet her as she exited the car. Heads swiveled and conversation lagged as they were led to a table. Friendly and handsome with a large smile that invited greetings, Monahan, the Minister for Economic Development, was easily recognized. He had learned early on it was better to move along slowly in these circumstances than to try and rush to your table.

Avis walking with him enjoyed the adulation. Was it for him or for her? After years of being careful and not attracting attention, suddenly in this restaurant she reveled in it. Maybe it was careless but who would know her here from her past life in America?

Eating out in downtown Dublin restaurants is a bit like theater, everyone avidly interested in the rest of the patrons. La Serre cultivated the air of serious eating combined with business meetings, as though table hopping and gossiping about the other patrons didn’t happen here.

A waiter hurried by with a plate of veal, the smell of herbs, wine and rich sauce wafting on the air.

Avis slid into her seat and slipped off her jacket, her creamy shirt glowed against her olive skin. As people at neighboring tables watched covertly, they consulted the menu.

A glass of bubbly to toast today? said Pearce with a smile.

I’d love one.

The celebration was for the 100 acres that were under contract since that morning to Pearce’s Economic Project for Training and Development, dubbed ACORN.

Although he had not sat in on the final negotiations of the sale, he didn’t need to consult his notes. His advisor Connell McDaid had phoned him with what was agreed, a final sum that the minister had himself already promised. Even so, that hadn’t stopped McDaid grumbling at the cost, again.

For Pearce’s part, he found it liberating to have the land at last.

Congratulations. The Moorehead land is yours, she said, finally focusing that brilliant smile on him.

Yes. Well just a portion of it, he said. Aware his neighbors were openly eavesdropping and listening to every word, he smiled back.

Yes, it’s true we still have a substantial estate. And we have started horse training again.

They talked through lunch in the same easygoing manner.

He looked at his watch. Duty calls.

With that, they got up to leave.

Let’s get the legal heads together. My office, same time next week.

As they walked to the door she said, Come to the races on Saturday. My horse Mystique is running. I think she has a good chance.

OK I’ll try, though I’m not much of a racing fan.

Connell McDaid came to rest in front of the coffee shop, glad his jog was over. He knew he was a worrier and needed the exercise to stop brooding, but sometimes it was a chore.

He ordered a double espresso and brought it over to the window seat. Reviewing the events of the day before, not for the first time he argued with himself why his boss Pearce Monahan had insisted on buying the land from Avis.

Instead of other perfectly good sites that cost about one third less, this move seemed reckless for the usually shrewdest of politicians.

Overpaying for the land was his biggest problem. The public was always on the alert for profligate spending even though Monahan would argue that the site was perfect. On a commuter train route, with excellent roads to the capital and the airport, a village with amenities and enough housing surrounding it. Monahan also liked to point out the finance was from outside investors, not a euro coming from the Irish taxpayers. Supplied by venture capitalists, mostly Irish Americans, who naturally wanted a good return on their investment.

Yet ever since Avis had offered her land, the Minister seemed to have an obsession for it. Or for her?

He sipped the espresso, and with a grumble from his stomach, realized he was hungry. At this time of day late Saturday morning, the place was full. Looking around him in the long line for a muffin, he realized he didn’t know anyone, although it was quite close to his apartment on the south side of Dublin near the canal. The area was a mix of apartment and office blocks, intermingled with older Georgian houses, cottages, shops and a pub.

As he thought about it he realized he had no social life to speak of. Too many late nights working.

The land he was in turmoil over was needed for the workshops/small business incubator areas for ACORN, a project which Monahan passionately believed in and was eager to get going in a country where unemployment was acute.

As economic advisor to the minister, most of McDaid’s brief at this point was to track down the land and get the project off the ground. Yet ever since Moorehead had been put on the table, other possibilities for locations were swept away.

That site is perfect, 100 acres, a bit over an hour from the capital, give or take traffic. The planning is in place. When the sale goes through we can start putting the plant up immediately, Monahan had enthused.

Let’s stay on the same page here. We have a budget and this is way too much money, McDaid had argued.

I want that site McDaid. Haggle if you can, he said as he went out the door on his way to the the Irish Parliament (Dail). Then, as if in an afterthought, he stuck his head around the door.

But she probably won’t budge, he said smiling.

McDaid had bargained and she had come down a little while the two of them had sat in Monahan’s office.

She had strolled in yesterday morning, surprising McDaid with her dramatic looks. A curtain of silky hair framed the high cheekbones that seemed to reach her slanting dark eyes.

McDaid, I’ve heard all about you.

When she sat down, her skirt rode up her thigh but he knew he couldn’t look that way for fear of distraction from the issues at hand. After half an hour of fruitless negotiations, he felt defeated.

His only trump cards were the other sites and that he felt the investors would never agree to a sale at that price.

She had sighed as though he was mentally impaired. No chance. Moorehead is the one he wants. she smiled.

McDaid went out of the room and tried Pearce’s cell phone. Straight to voicemail.

Back in the room, he walked over to the window and looked out at the wintry scene below.

Interrupting his thoughts she said, Let’s get on with it. You will have a great site for the program.

He turned around and stared her down for a few moments.

Subject to Monahan and the investors being happy with the price and that the other provisions are met, I agree to the sale, he told her curtly.

She was right of course. Monahan wanted it and had told him in no uncertain terms not to let it go.

After the meeting, McDaid phoned Monahan and asked if the investors would be agreeable to the sale. Monahan thought there would be no problem, as they trusted his judgment.

Came down a few thousand but otherwise wouldn’t give an inch. Must think there is an oil well to be found there.

We can finally get our project off the ground now, excitement evident in Pearce’s voice.

There was nothing he could do about it now. The Moorehead land was theirs and they had to make it work.

A new Irish group on Radio Three sent a message of mayhem to the urban world as Rosie Leahy brought her car to a halt in the Dublin racecourse parking space. Mostly deserted now, as the races were not due to start for another hour,. As the music slowly died, she wished it were a Saturday with nothing to do. Instead, there were people to be interviewed for a Faces at the Races feature for the magazine.

The rain was coming down in sheets and she was tired from staying out late the night before. She should have known better. The evening had started the usual way these things do in Dublin with a few drinks after work to celebrate a colleague’s engagement. Next thing you know it’s close to midnight, eating much too late in the dim light of a nightclub as a DJ belted out music that seemed to make the dancers happy, but did nothing for an emerging headache.

She closed her eyes for a moment. She’d come early with the hope that she’d find a decent story to offset the puff piece the editor Tom Grady of the magazine, IRELAND TODAY, wanted covered that day: flattering pictures of the country’s celebrities and their horses.

It’s a status thing, they love to see themselves featured mingling with the horsey set, in the owners and trainers paddock. It proves they’ve arrived or something. He rambled on over the protests of Rosie who had drawn the assignment this time.

I can do gossipy. Whatever it takes, Rosie countered back. But why pander to this group month after month?

Grady wasn’t having it.

The magazine was a curious mix of topics that somehow worked, finding a niche as a weekly political and business publication. With a diet of factual reporting, zesty interviews, sly digs and gossip wedged in between the property, business and investigative stories.

When Grady had launched IRELAND TODAY over five years ago, he’d fought the know-alls who predicted its swift demise. In a country awash with magazines and media outlets and an Internet full of instant news, he’d managed to fashion a magazine that he believed straddled the different facets of Irish life.

Idly peering through the car windows, Rosie wiped the condensation away to see better. She needed to rouse herself from her torpor and get going.

At that moment, a silver Mercedes sports car drove into the car park and ground to a halt at the other end, quite a bit away from where she was parked.

Tony Valente, the hotshot developer of many of the country’s office and apartment blocks. In finding construction sites, he had decimated many architectural gems like the Queen Anne church that had disappeared overnight.

Always a step ahead of the preservation orders, he was an embarrassment to his father-in-law Pearce Monahan.

He exited his car and walked purposefully along with a woman who came around from the other side. At that moment a gust of wind swept the woman sideways, giving Rosie a glimpse of her face framed by a large hat that kept the rain away.

Nobody she knew. Definitely not his wife, her friend Sarah Monahan.

She didn’t think Valente owned bloodstock. Somehow she felt he preferred bricks and mortar to the blood and guts of temperamental racehorses.

He could be up to something.

Hopefully not redeveloping the racecourse, sticking hundreds of boxy houses on it for huge profits though anything was possible. As she watched their departing backs she could scent a story, and felt her journalistic antennae twitching.

Time to do a bit of sleuthing.

She jammed a crushed dark velvet hat on her head that covered most of her thick auburn hair and pulled her long raincoat around her as the raw day chilled her body. Valente and the woman were at the further end of the car park. Without much of an idea of what she was going to do next she moved along behind other cars, well out of his sight.

Maybe she could get a scoop. She’d recently penned an expose of two politicians who came into riches overnight by voting to change the zoning of agricultural land to commercial, making it fifty times more valuable. She had relished opening the doors of the companies set up to shield them and discovered they were two of the investors.

The wind seemed to have blown the rain away.

Rosie walked slowly across the car park, past the stall of a raucous Dublin woman, swaddled in crossover aprons.

Oranges, sweets, chocolates, pears, she shouted.

The woman got Rosie’s attention so she stopped and bought a Mars bar from her.

Valente was easy to keep track of, striding along in a camel-hair coat and brimmed hat. The woman swung along beside him, nearly as tall as he was. For some reason it looked like a business meeting, not one of two lovers.

The Saturday afternoon races were a popular hangout in Dublin. The bookies, leather bags across their chests, were getting their boards together where they chalked their odds. No sign yet of the tic-tac men who scanned the betting boards and communicated the prices.

Rosie kept herself a safe distance from Valente, as he knew her well.

As of late there was tension between them and she reminded herself of this fact. She decided to abandon the investigation. Forget about it. Bad idea. She might come face to face with them. There were a few people moving beyond the stand area and she hung to the side of them. Valente and the woman disappeared out of sight.

With time to kill before the start of the races, she walked around to the stables. She encountered a group of Dublin businessmen surrounding a beautiful black horse, jointly owned. It was entered in one of the races. A bottle of bubbly was fished out of a briefcase and passed around. Between pats of the horse and a gulp of the bubbly she got caught up with their enthusiasm. She vowed not to admit it to Grady, or he would have her at the races every month.

She left them and walked past a cluster of outbuildings and stables. She could hear faint strands of classical music coming from one of them. Then the music stopped. A chestnut horse was led out from the stable by a middle-aged man, burly in tweeds and raincoat who looked at her inquiringly with small red-rimmed eyes. The smell of alcohol drifted over.

Looking for someone? he said, sniffling a bit as the horse snorted impatiently.

A friend. It’s okay.

The man shrugged as he started past her. Nobody in my stable at the moment and the stable next door is out of commission. Had a fire there, it’s unusable.

She nodded and walked on for a bit before deciding it was time to turn back. Passing the stable where they had the fire she peered inside the gaping open door, then went a few more steps inside. It was dim and quiet, stretching into the distance with stalls on either side. She could see where a fire had blackened the rafters and the stalls and aisles were untidy with discarded wood and rubbish; there was an acrid smell of burnt wood and dung. It probably dated from the earliest days of the racecourse when horses came from all over Ireland, the UK and the continent. It looked ripe for redevelopment.

To the left the barn branched off. Idly she looked down it and in the void could see a group through the dusty mist. Valente and the woman. They were leaning close to a small man with a bushy mustache and sunglasses who was backed against the wall. It was obvious that an argument was in progress. She was too far away though to hear the voices.

What was going on? Could it be that a jockey was being encouraged to change the outcome of a race? There was menace in the way they were treating him yet she knew she didn’t want to get involved.

As she turned around to leave, she heard a sharp crack or pop from where the trio was.

Gunshot?

Heart beating fast, she knew she needed to get out of there. As she scooted quickly towards the exit, her cell phone shrilled in the silence and in her haste to silence it her foot struck a pile of bottles and cans. The clang they made seemed liked thunder in her ears. No way Valente hadn’t heard that too.

Out of the door and breathing hard, she ran away.

Stop running. Don’t be so visible.

She quickly mingled into the crowds.

TWO

The races were about to begin. The day had brightened up a bit and the rain had completely stopped.

Rosie was to meet Dan Loughlin, IRELAND TODAY’s photographer, at the racecourse garden bar. In the summer there were tables outside, but the patio was empty now, all the life inside the bar.

Through the door she could see Loughlin was propped against the corner of the counter. Tall and ungainly with graying hair in a short pony, the camera was slung over the back of the chair. He could be dryly humorous if he were in the mood, but not today by the looks of him. Or at least not yet. He nodded bleakly at her.

She ordered coffee and a sandwich. The smoked salmon, nestled on brown bread with a little mayonnaise, was delicious. Even the coffee was good, not always the way in bars at the racecourse. The place was filling up rapidly, many would spend the day there looking at the races on the closed circuit TV, not venturing outside in the elements.

Halfway through her sandwich, she scanned the crowd. At the door her glance connected with Tony Valente standing just inside. She nodded at him and then made to turn away but not before she could see he looked wild, his hair tossed, his face and eyes hard. In a rage. She felt a jolt but when she looked again, he was gone.

It was all over in seconds, but it left her visibly shaken.

Was the rage because he had caught a glimpse of her disappearing and realized she must have spied on him or because of that encounter in the stable?

She shook off her unease but remained alert. She didn’t underestimate Valente. He was tough, not somebody you took on lightly. He’d faced down everyone from politicians to tough building contractors and won. His thugs were rumored to be behind the pot shots at the windows of tenants in apartments that he’d bought at rock bottom prices and wanted cleared. Even in the hurly-burly construction world around the capital he was considered a loose cannon. Other developers shunned him. Too unpredictable.

Pearce and Moira Monahan had brought Rosie to live with them as a teenager when her parents had died. She had been close to Sarah Monahan, their only child, until she had married Valente four years ago. Pearce Monahan couldn’t hide his distain and in the ensuing chaos Sarah had distanced herself from family and friends, disappearing into Valente’s world.

Dan shrugged himself into his jacket and took his camera from the chair. He frowned at Rosie who was staring into space. Wake up, Rosie. Time to do a bit of work.

Okay let’s go.

They prowled the stands and enclosures. Photographers know the faces in the news, often better than reporters. Dan’s expertise in spotting potential interviewees helped them zero in on their targets, finding bankers and partners in horse syndicates. The American CEO of an international company who planned to sponsor a race in the summer and bring the sales force over was in their lineup. Politicians with horses gave journalists new opportunities to bicker and be competitive.

Somewhere in the crowd she got a tip for the sixth race, the Calderwood Stakes.

Mystique, trained and owned by the Johnson-Carters. The wife is rumored to have sold part of their land to Minister Monahan for the ACORN project, he added as he disappeared.

She knew Pearce was looking for land for workshops and industrial buildings but she hadn’t realized he had already struck a deal on it. She wished he had given her the scoop but just because she was family, that wasn’t the way he did business. Always a stickler for fairness.

The wind had died down, a touch of blue and a flash of sun came and went through the scudding clouds then disappeared. The crowd didn’t care, the races were in full flight.

With enough interviews in the can, Dan who had revived his spirits said, Time for a little fun. I’m going for a bet. He followed the nags with enthusiasm but didn’t think much of the Mystique tip. Heard a rumor about it but there are lots of great horses in this race. It has a big purse. That being said, Terry Johnson-Carter is a brilliant trainer. Remember Victory and Sally’s Girl? Great horses.

Rosie nodded to keep Dan talking. He had a riding accident a few years ago and is partially paralyzed. Now he’s back training with his wife, an American named Avis. Is this the horse to kick start his career again? He paused as they moved towards the bookies before continuing, Don’t think I’m betting on it.

A bet for good luck, Rosie reasoned. If the Johnson-Carters were selling land to Pearce Monahan, that was enough for her. The odds were twenty to one.

There were twelve runners going to the post. Dan and Rosie crowded up on the stands as the anticipation started to grow for this race. For a while the horses were in the distance, the two favorites moving up neck to neck, and the rest of the horses clamped together close behind. The crowd started to stir. The names of the favorites on many lips.

Come on Habitat, put your feet under you, Dr. No. The crowd was muttering low, binoculars trained. The whole of the racecourse seemed to have backed these horses.

As the field turned into the straight there was a wall of horses up front, those behind jammed in. Then the smallest of lanes opened and a horse from behind dived for it, crashing into the horse on her left and bringing him down, causing a ripple effect to the horses beside them. Somehow staying upright, she shot through like a missile, a challenge to the favorite who